Performance

Wired Performance

We benchmarked the routing performance of the WZR-D1800H and carried out the rest of our tests using the iperf utility. We checked out a direct connection as well as the PPPoE client. The results (relative to a PC located on the LAN) can be viewed in the diagram.

The static-IP connection is rather fast at over 750 Mbps. The PPPoE performance is lower, yet the router can use up a 100Mbps channel even in this case.

VPN Performance

We benchmarked the VPN server using a static-IP internet connection. We checked out CHAP without MPPE and MSCHAP v2 with MPPE 128. The direction is specified relative to the remote client.

When the traffic is not encrypted, the data-transfer speed is 50-60 Mbps. With MPPE 128, the speed is lower at 25-40 Mbps. In any case, this is going to be enough for most VPN usage scenarios except for exchanging very large documents.

Wireless Performance

We benchmarked the wireless connection using the WLI-H4-D1300 as a client device. The devices were placed at a distance of 5 meters from each other. We enabled WPA2-PSK AES encryption and tested 802.11ac and 802.11n in the 5 and 2.4GHz bands using different channel width (the number of channels). We launched one, four and eight data-transfer streams in one direction or both directions concurrently. Let’s start out with the most interesting operation mode: 802.11ac, 5 GHz, 80MHz channel.

The data-transfer speed is over 200 Mbps for one stream. With eight streams, the speed is as high as 300 Mbps. That’s the best result we’ve ever seen in our tests. Of course, this is far from 1 Gbps, yet more than 10 times the speed of 802.11g. But if you’ve got high-speed 802.11n equipment, there is no real need for upgrading because the new generation of Wi-Fi products is only about 50% faster.

Switching into the 40MHz mode (two 802.11n channels) lowers the speed to about 200 Mbps for eight streams. It must be noted that a larger number of streams does not affect the overall speed as much as with 802.11ac.

The 2.4GHz band is supported by another radio module and its performance is somewhat disappointing. It’s no good for a 450Mbps device to be only as fast as 100 Mbps. We don’t know the reason for this poor performance. Neighboring networks might interfere although their signal level was low during our tests and we used the least used channels.